Category: Electronics

Finally, D4 (our big project of the year) is done and dusted! It was a pretty interesting couple of weeks, despite being filled with stress, aggrovation and late nights. We had to design a fire detection system that could accurately measure temperature, detect smoke and the presence of people from up to four sensors and display that information on a web interface.

The basic design consisted of up to four Sensor nodes that contained a thermistor (measures temperature), smoke sensor from a butchered smoke alarm, and a PIR (Passive InfraRed) detector, and the Central Node which then connected to a PC. Each node had to have a memory to store data in the event of a power or communications failure, and the PC was used to control and monitor the whole system. A database (well, CSV file…) was used to store data from all sensors on the PC and that same file was used by the web interface to display tables and graphs of what was going down.